From the floor of Transducers ’09 Day 3

Neither had I – it certainly isn’t anything we saw at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science the other day.

But Cliff Fung says a nanotube forest sprang to life for him in the talk he heard this morning during the 3D Technologies session he attended this third day of Transducers 2009.

Makes me think about nanobots roaming through a microforest glen, which is as amazing to imagine as it must have been for Leeuwenhoek to make the leap of comprehension he did when he observed, with his new microscopes 300 years ago, “an unbelievably great company of living animalcules, a-swimming more nimbly than any I had ever seen up to this time.”

I can’t completely recommend The Diamond Age, a novel by Neal Stephenson (the book gets a little freaky near the end), but large parts of the near-future world Stephenson imagines do seem they will come to pass, given the sensor and actuator technologies being presented in Denver this week.